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• SNES Hardware Compression

  16 juin 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  I was browsing the source code for some Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) emulators recently. I learned some interesting things about compression hardware. I had previously uncovered one compression algorithm used in an SNES title but that was implemented in software.

  SNES game cartridges — being all hardware — were at liberty to expand the hardware capabilities of the base system by adding new processors. The most well-known of these processors was the Super FX which allows for basic polygon graphical rendering, powering such games as Star Fox. It was by no means the only such add-on processor, though. Here is a Wikipedia page of all the enhancement chips used in assorted SNES games. A number of them mention compression and so I delved into the emulators to find the details :

  • The Super FX is listed in Wikipedia vaguely as being able to decompress graphics. I see no reference to decompression in emulator source code.
  • DSP-3 emulation source code makes reference to LZ-type compression as well as tree/symbol decoding. I’m not sure if the latter is a component of the former. Wikipedia lists the chip as supporting "Shannon-Fano bitstream decompression."
  • Similar to Super FX, the SA-1 chip is listed in Wikipedia as having some compression capabilities. Again, either that’s not true or none of the games that use the chip (notably Super Mario RPG) make use of the feature.
  • The S-DD1 chip uses arithmetic and Golomb encoding for compressing graphics. Wikipedia refers to this as the ABS Lossless Entropy Algorithm. Googling for further details on that algorithm name yields no results, but I suspect it’s unrelated to anti-lock brakes. The algorithm is alleged to allow Star Ocean to smash 13 MB of graphics into a 4 MB cartridge ROM (largest size of an SNES cartridge).
  • The SPC7110 can decompress data using a combination of arithmetic coding and Z-curve/Morton curve reordering.

  No, I don’t plan to implement codecs for these schemes. But it’s always comforting to know that I could.

  Not directly a compression scheme, but still a curious item is the MSU1 concept put forth by the bsnes emulator. This is a hypothetical coprocessor implemented by bsnes that gives an emulated cartridge access to a 4 GB address space. What to do with all this space ? Allow for the playback of uncompressed PCM audio as well as uncompressed video at 240x144x256 colors @ 30 fps. According to the docs and the source code, the latter feature doesn’t appear to be implemented, though ; only the raw PCM playback.

• Tele-Arena Lives On

  25 février 2011, par Multimedia Mike — Game Hacking

  Readers know I have a peculiar interest in taking apart video games and that I would rather study a game’s inner workings than actually play it. I take an interest on others’ efforts in this same area. It’s still in my backlog to take a closer look at Clone2727’s body of work. But I wanted to highlight my friend’s work on re-implementing a game called Tele-Arena.

  
  
  

  Back In The Day
  As some of you are likely aware, there was a dark age of online communication that predated the era of widespread internet access. This was known as "The BBS Age". People dialed into these BBSes using modems that operated at abysmal transfer speeds and would communicate with other users, upload and download files, and play an occasional game.

  BBS software evolved and perhaps the ultimate (and final) evolution was Galacticomm’s MajorBBS (MBBS). There were assorted games that plugged into the MBBS, all rendered in glorious color ANSI graphics. One of the most famous of these games was Tele-Arena (TA). TA was a multiplayer fantasy-themed text adventure game. Perhaps you could think of it as World of Warcraft, only rendered as interactive fiction instead of a rich 3D landscape. (Disclaimer : I might not be qualified to make that comparison since I have never experienced WoW firsthand, though I did play TA on and off about 17 years ago).

  TA was often compared to multi-user dungeons — or MUDs — that were played by telneting into internet servers hosting games. Such comparisons were usually unfavorable as people who had experience with both TA and MUDs were sniffy elitists with internet access who thought they were sooooo much better than those filthy, BBS-dialing serfs.

  Sorry, didn’t mean to open old wounds.

  Modern Retelling of A Classic Tale
  Anyway, my friend Ron Kinney is perhaps the world’s biggest fan of TA. So much so that he has re-implemented the engine in Java under the project name Ether. He’s in a similar situation as the ScummVM project in that, while the independent, open source engine is fair game for redistribution, it would be questionable to redistribute the original data files. That’s why he created an AreaBuilder application that generates independent game data files.

  Ironically, you can also telnet into a server on which Ron hosts an instance of Tele-Arena (ironic in the sense that the internet/BBS conflict gets a little blurry).

  I hope that one day Ron will regale us with the strangest tales from the classic TA days. My personal favorite was "Wrath of a Sysop."

• vc1 : Move INIT_LUT() further up to allow using it in more places

  24 avril 2013, par Michael Niedermayer

  vc1 : Move INIT_LUT() further up to allow using it in more places
  Signed-off-by : Martin Storsjö <martin@martin.st>
  

  • [DH] libavcodec/vc1.c